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Sunday, 9 December 2007

Jerry Seinfeld's 3 rules of life

Andrew Denton is a tremendous interviewer and his TV program ‘Enough Rope’ is one of my favourites. More on Denton in futue blogs. He recently interviewed Jerry Seinfeld and asked him “Do you remember the rules of life? You had three rules of life.”

Here is my edited transcript of Jerry’s reply “…I came up with bust your ass, pay attention and fall in love. Bust your ass is just basically whatever you do, work as hard as you can, only good can come of it. And pay attention is just notice enough about what is, you know, about what’s going on around you. You can absorb and learn from everything around you all the time. And fall in love wasn’t, isn’t, romantic love, rather it is like if I get a really good cup of coffee I like to just go, you know what, just hang on a second. This is a fantastic cup of coffee. Isn’t this a great, and I’ll ask everyone, isn’t this great coffee? Cos you know, it’s not always great. This one is great, you know.

This is one of the things that I really did learn from George Burns, and why I had such respect for him is that I will stop and make that moment, you know, you will enjoy life more if you do that. You know, you get a great parking spot, just go…Hold it a second, I mean look at that spot. I mean it’s, we could have been blocks away and we’re right here.”